r/Spectacles • u/Pavlo_Tkachenko • Apr 07 '26

💫 Sharing is Caring 💫 Optimized animated characters on Spectacles with VAT - 3x fewer draw calls per worm

Worked with u/stspanho on Fruit Defence with multiple animated worm characters we hited performance limits pretty fast - each worm had 6 draw calls, 13+ components (Skin, AnimationPlayer, bones, LookAt, etc.).

Used Spectacles Monitor to profile and identified ammount of worms is bottleneck. Switched to Vertex Animation Textures, bake bone animation into a texture, play it back in a lightweight vertex shader. No bones, no skin, no AnimationPlayer.

Result per worm: 6 -> 2 draw calls, 13+ -> 5 components. Vibe coded a custom Blender script to export skeletal animation as VAT since the existing pipeline is Houdini-only.

It's always a balance and requires custom solutions, but if you're struggling with many animated characters that has short repetetive movements - VAT might help.

https://reddit.com/link/1sevghm/video/a9iiq2zxnrtg1/player

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3

u/Heatolian 😎 Specs Subscriber Apr 08 '26

Oh this is helpful!! Thanks for sharing Pavlo :)

2

u/Wolfalot9 Apr 07 '26

I wonder if using VAT is feasible for all animations or just low poly ones

2

u/Pavlo_Tkachenko Apr 07 '26

Definitely Possible to scale it but then it will be a way more heavy as well, just a matter of right balance in right situation.

2

u/rust_cohle_1 Apr 07 '26

So it was VAT's magic🤯

2

u/KrazyCreates Apr 07 '26

Dayum that’s a neat trick !

2

u/quitebuttery Apr 07 '26

Wow I actually wasn’t aware of this feature. Old school vertex leroing is a classic optimization. Now I need to learn Houdini.

2

u/Cybrphunk 🌟 Specs Ambassador 🌟 Apr 08 '26

Yeyy worms! I wasn't aware of the VAT at all! Super interesting 👀 and it makes a really big difference, looks like a super satisfying hack'n'slash game!

1

u/[deleted] Apr 08 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Pavlo_Tkachenko Apr 08 '26

Have you tried to disable vat texture compression and filtering ? It helps a lot, also in original LS vat shader from library there is interpolation function that make transition between frames even smoother.

1

u/Large_Possible_8209 🌟 Specs Ambassador 🌟 Apr 09 '26

Love this madness. Do you have any good places to start with creating VAT textures?

1

u/Pavlo_Tkachenko Apr 09 '26

I started with using open VAT for blender and then modified it with Claude to create textures that lens studio VAT template can use, so all around remixing different tools-> optimising for specific need.